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IEEE 1284, also known as the Centronics port, is a standard that defines bi-directional parallel communications between computers and other devices. It was originally developed in the 1970s by Centronics before its IEEE standardization.
In the 1970s, Centronics developed the now-familiar printer parallel port that soon became a de facto standard. Centronics had introduced the first successful low-cost seven-wire print head[ citation needed ], which used a series of solenoids to pull the individual metal pins to strike a ribbon and the paper.
A dot matrix print head consists of a series of metal pins arranged in a vertical row. Each pin is attached to some sort of actuator, a solenoid in the case of Centronics, which can pull the pin forward to strike a ribbon and the paper. The entire print head is moved horizontally in order to print a line of text, striking the paper several times to produce a matrix for each character. Character sets on early printers normally used 7 by 5 "pixels" to produce 80-column text.
The complexity of printing a character as a sequence of columns of dots is managed by the printer electronics, which receives character encodings from the computer one at a time, with the bits transferred serially or in parallel. [1] As printers grew in sophistication, and the cost of memory dropped, printers began adding increasing amounts of buffer memory, initially a line or two, but then whole pages and then documents.
The original port design was send-only, allowing data to be sent from the host computer to the printer. Separate pins in the port allow status information to be sent back to the computer. This was a serious limitation as printers became "smarter" and a richer set of status codes were desired. This led to an early expansion of the system introduced by HP, the "Bitronics" implementation released in 1992. This used the status pins of the original port to form a 4-bit parallel port for sending arbitrary data back to the host.
A further modification, "Bi-Directional", used the status pins to indicate the direction of data flow on the 8-bit main data bus; by indicating there was data to send to the host on one of the pins, all eight data pins became available for use. This proved adaptable, and led to the "Enhanced Parallel Port" standard, which worked like Bi-Directional mode but greatly increased the signalling speeds to 2 MB/s, and later the "Extended Capability Port" version increased this to 2.5 MB/s.
In 1991 the Network Printing Alliance was formed to develop a new standard. In March 1994, the IEEE 1284 specification was released. 1284 included all of these modes, and allowed operation in any of them.
The IEEE 1284 standard allows for faster throughput and bidirectional data flow with a theoretical maximum throughput of 4 MB/s; actual throughput is around 2 MB/s depending on hardware. In the printer venue, this allows for faster printing and back-channel status and management. Since the new standard allowed the peripheral to send large amounts of data back to the host, devices that had previously used SCSI interfaces could be produced at a much lower cost. This included scanners, tape drives, hard disks, computer networks connected directly via parallel interface, network adapters and other devices. No longer was the consumer required to purchase an expensive SCSI card—they could simply use their built-in parallel interface.
The parallel interface has since been mostly displaced by local area network interfaces and USB 2.0.
IEEE 1284 can operate in five modes:
Most recent computers that include a parallel port can operate the port in ECP or EPP mode, or both simultaneously.
IEEE-1284 requires that bi-directional device communication is always initiated in Nibble Mode. If the host receives no reply in this mode, it will assume that the device is a legacy printer, and enter Compatibility Mode. Otherwise, the best mode that is supported on both sides of the connection is negotiated between the host and client devices by exchanging standardized Nibble Mode messages.
An IEEE-compliant cable must meet several standards of wiring and quality. Three types of connectors are defined:
There are two kinds of IEEE 1284 cables:
In IEEE 1284 Daisy Chain Specification, up to eight devices can be connected to a single parallel port.
All modes use TTL voltage logic levels, which limits the possible cable length to a few meters unless expensive special cables are used. [4]
The following are the typical colors found on 25-pin IEEE 1284 cable leads.[ citation needed ]
| Pin | Color | Alt. color |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | red | |
| 2 | pink/red | |
| 3 | brown | |
| 4 | orange | |
| 5 | light-blue/yellow | |
| 6 | light-blue/red | |
| 7 | light-blue | |
| 8 | blue | |
| 9 | light-blue/black | green/blue |
| 10 | green | |
| 11 | yellow | |
| 12 | pink/orange | |
| 13 | gray | |
| 14 | gray/green | |
| 15 | pink/blue | orange/white |
| 16 | pink/black | brown/white |
| 17 | light blue/blue | light blue/green |
| 18 | blue-white | |
| 19 | green/black | green/red |
| 20 | pink/white | yellow/black |
| 21 | gray/black | |
| 22 | white/black | gray/yellow |
| 23 | purple | |
| 24 | pink | |
| 25 | white | |
| NC | white/yellow | white/green |
| All | white/purple | red/black |
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| Storage |
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| Peripheral | |
| Audio | |
| Portable | |
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Interfaces are listed by their speed in the (roughly) ascending order, so the interface at the end of each section should be the fastest.  Category | |
